4 Free Tools That Expose Mining Promoter Lies (an Engineer's Guide)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This video is sponsored by Terrahutton, who makes the invisible, investible. Today on Resource Talks, how do you catch a company smearing a single high-grade drill hit across meters of worthless waste rock? How do promoters manipulate a project's cashflow model to spit out a massive yet completely fake NPV?
How can non-GEOs and non-engineers use basic engineering formulas to essentially audit a technical press release in like, call it 10 minutes? And a few other questions are going to be answered here today. Hopefully, luckily for you though, I won't be doing any of that answering. Ken Kuchling is here with me. He's a mining engineer with over 40 years of experience designing open pit mines and managing feasibility studies. He's the one doing the answering here. Ken is also the creator of Drilling Down. That's a set of free online calculators and apps that hopefully we're going to get through a few of those here today.
You can use real engineering formulas that he's collected over the years as he's worked through spreadsheets and whatnot. You can use those formulas to audit your new mining companies essentially. That's even if you're not an engineer, but you're just trying to make sense of a very complicated sector, hopefully without fainting. Ken, I know you're a busy man, so I'll stop losing your time. Thank you for sitting down with me today.

**Ken Kuchling** (1:18)
Yeah, it's my pleasure to sit here with you. Long time listener, first time caller.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:24)
Well, thank you so much for saying that. And yeah, the pleasure is mine. I'm looking forward to going over these apps that you have here, because I think not many realize that you do and that they are out there. Like you and I have been interacting on Twitter and so on for a while now, and I only just realized that you've got him. But also when I did find him, it was a bit much. Like there's quite a few of them. It's a bit much to take in and I didn't know where to start. So maybe you can kind of help me off with starting. But yeah, where do I start? Like which one of these calculators is the most useful or could be most valuable to a non-technical junior mining speculator?

**Ken Kuchling** (2:01)
Okay. First, the basis for these apps are the due diligence work I've done over the years. I was always involved in looking at early stage projects for clients, looking at potential acquisitions, and sometimes they wanted a second opinion.
Is this project good? Is it viable? Should we acquire it? And so I had built all these little spreadsheet calculators that would let me do all this stuff for them. And so I just wanted to share some of these on the platform now that I've discovered a vibe coding tool that lets me create these very quickly. I mean, to create one of these calculators right now takes two to four hours. It's very fast to do it. So they're pretty much all based on spreadsheets and databases that I was tracking as part of this work. The most valuable one for me, the way I would look at projects is the rock value, the in situ rock value and the recovered rock value, sometimes termed the NSR rock value.
That tells me everything I need to know about the project at an early stage. And that is probably the one I suggest people really get familiar with. You don't have to use this calculator to do it, this app. You can do it in your own spreadsheets. It's not rocket science. But that is really the most valuable one for me at the start.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:25)
Well, maybe you can actually walk me through how to use it here in a couple of seconds. But what's in it for me? Why would I want to learn that? What would I learn out of learning how to use it?

**Ken Kuchling** (3:36)
Okay. The best application for it is on polymetallics where you have more than one metal. You might have gold, silver, copper, gold, silver, nickel, lead, zinc.
How do you know what that rock is worth? It's often converted to an equivalent value. Equivalent grade, copper equivalent, gold equivalent. But personally, I hate the equivalents. I don't like using them. The formulas sometimes don't make sense. They're not intuitive. For example, if you have a copper, gold, silver equivalent, the gold price itself plays a big role.
At a $4,000, let's say you have something that's gold, silver, copper. At $4,000 an ounce gold, you might get an equivalent of 1.42, let's say. And if you lower the gold price to 2,000, the equivalent goes up to 1.84. So you lower the gold price, the equivalent goes up. Intuitively, does that make sense? It doesn't make sense. So I always prefer to work with NSR rock value. So if the gold price goes down, the NSR goes down and vice versa. So to me, that's the most intuitive way. And you'll also know mining cost, you might have a project with a $20 processing cost, a $5 G&A, okay, that's $25. So that tells me my rock has to exceed $25 in order to be processed.